The Familiar

by Leigh Bardugo

Her aunt had warned her long ago that some people brought misery with them like weather,

One was not supposed to mourn the dead; it was said to deny the miracle of resurrection. But the death of a queen was different. The city was meant to grieve her passing, and her funeral procession was a spectacle rivaled only by her stepson Carlos’s death earlier that year. Luzia’s first cries as she entered the world were mixed with the weeping of every madrileño for their lost queen. “It confused you,” Blanca told her. “You thought they were crying for you, and it has given you too much ambition.”

She might be Ruth, her father had said, she might be Esther. But her mother came from a long line of learned men, and she whispered, These statues aren’t for us.

“Why teach me to read if I’m meant to live a life without books? Why teach me Latin when a parrot would have more opportunity to speak it?”

Luzia saw her reflection in the goblet, changed but unchanged, made perfect and ruined all the same.

She hoped that Marius was right, that it wasn’t beauty life required, but will.

Better to live in fear than in grinding discontent. Better to dare this new path than continue her slow, grim march down the road that had been chosen for her. At least the scenery would be different.

Later Luzia would understand that when it came to anything worth having, there was no end to more.

Too much ambition, her mother had warned, telling the story of Luzia’s birth and how the city had wept for a queen. Too much wanting.

Why did she feel the echo of that slender tune inside her lungs, a song desperate to be sung again, louder, the shape of it so large it might crack her ribs in its desire to be freed?

She knew how to get the stains out of linen and wipe the streaks from glass. She knew nothing of politics or influence.

“If I wanted you frightened, you would be.

Illusions belong to the devil. Miracles belong to God.”

There is a fine line between a saint and a witch, and I wonder if you are prepared to walk it.”

There was nothing more dangerous than a woman with a pen in her hand.

Language creates possibility. Sometimes by being used. Sometimes by being kept secret.

There was pleasure in shared magic, and danger too. It pricked the mind and the spirit. It filled the room with possibility.

“How do I know if my power is angelic?” Santángel sat down on the bed across from her. “That’s a dangerous question. More dangerous than being a conversa in the king’s court.”

“I’ve seen all manner of power,” he said. “Sacred and perverse. I’ve never been able to locate the lines between science, and faith, and magic, nor have I cared to.”

“Fear men, Luzia,” he said. “Fear their ambition and the crimes they commit in its service. But don’t fear magic or what you may do with it.”

With him she wasn’t afraid. Here with the scorpion who knew her secrets, with a killer who made Hualit tremble and Águeda cross herself. Perhaps he didn’t fear the devil because he was a demon himself. People who cross paths with that man come to bad ends.

How strange his eyes were, and yet she couldn’t deny she liked being the focus of his attention.

“No soil. No rain. And yet it thrives. Who knows what you may do, Luzia Cotado?”

“I was wrong when I told you to fear men and their ambition,” he murmured in her ear. “Fear nothing, Luzia Cotado, and you will become greater than them all. Now sing for me.”

With his scullion in his arms, Santángel strode past the luckiest man in Madrid.

His health was returning and with it his appetites. Because of her.

“In another life, in another world, I would be called a familiar. My gifts are not my own. They exist only to serve others. People fear me because I want them to, because their fear makes my life easier.”

Which was the greater danger, the scorpion or Santángel?

Now we know each other. What would it mean to be known?

Until that cursed day in the widow’s courtyard. Now his heart beat, his stomach growled, his cock hardened. He was a man again, and he didn’t know whether to hate Luzia Cotado for this unasked for awakening or fall at her feet in gratitude.

“You’re done with me then?” she said as he strode to the door. I haven’t even begun.

Faith could be won. Curses could be broken.

She would be safe. “I would rather be powerful,” she whispered to no one at all.

There were many ways a servant learned to survive. She had years of experience biding her time, counting up the insults done to her. She wasn’t yet sure how badly she’d been wronged, but she could wait until she had allies powerful enough to protect her, for the right moment to let Víctor de Paredes know just what kind of enemy he had made.

“You don’t yet know what I may do,” Luzia said, and strode toward shore.

“Can my luck not be enough for you?” he asked. “Your luck brought me Luzia Cotado. If the king will not use her as the instrument she was meant to be, I will.”

There was the truth that had choked him in the scorpion’s den. He had doomed her before they had ever met.

Was there anything more dangerous than a man full of hope?

He was a killer. He was a liar. He was not a good man. But it was possible she didn’t want a good man.

There are different kinds of suffering, Valentina thought. The kind that takes you by surprise and the kind you live with so long, you stop noticing it.

The power wanted to follow. This time she let it. If it wished to be dangerous, to be unwieldy, to grow bigger and more awful than it should, who was she to stand in the way of its ambition?

The song spilled through her one last time, splitting, changing, tearing open the world. A change of scene. A change of fortune.